CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

120 CAPITALISM’S ACHILLES HEEL
Union political grouping. 138 Whatever reasons exist for including Cuba
among sponsors of terrorism are tenuous at best. And then governments
that terrorize their own populations are overlooked, such as Burma, Sudan,
Liberia, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Turkmenistan, and others.
By mid-2004, the U.S. government had designated nearly 400 organizations
and individuals as terrorists. Terrorist incidents are in the hundreds annually,
and deaths run from several hundred a year to the staggering blow
delivered against the United States in 2001, costing nearly 3,000 lives in a
single day.
Recognizing that the distinction among criminal gangs, terrorist groups,
and, for that matter, guerrilla armies, is not always clear, a brief review of some
of the more violent terrorist organizations as shown in Table 3.10 underlines
the extent of their activities across the globe.
I have said it several times: Crime and terrorism are related. When
western nations overlook or facilitate the flow of criminal money, terrorists
merely step into these same well-worn paths to move their money. They,
the terrorists, have not invented a single new way of generating and transferring
resources. Available techniques are all laid out for them, ready for
the picking.
Terrorists have three means of obtaining money. They can earn it, steal
it, or beg for it. Each of the three has brought them millions of dollars.
Terrorists own businesses. Particularly preferred are retail stores that
generate cash, import-export firms that provide cover for arms and drugs, remittance
systems sending money across borders, and even banks that provide
some legitimate services while shielding transfers of terrorist funds.
Aum in Japan runs computer stores, and Al Qaeda has received millions
from cooperating banking operations.
Then there are hundreds of ways to make money illegally. Bank robberies
utilize terrorists’ expertise, for example, pulled off by ETA in Spain.
Kidnapping and extortion are favorite devices among Colombian groups.
Protection rackets and community taxation are simply thefts by other
names, often used in the Philippines and South Asia. Many types of fraud
are available—credit card, insurance, medical payments, and more—promoted,
for example, by Middle Eastern cells in the United States. Smuggling,
also drawing on terrorists’ skills, is a favorite technique all over the
world, avoiding excise taxes or customs duties and selling at fat profits.
Counterfeiting or buying and reusing counterfeit currencies brings several